The Platform

The Green New Deal

The economy, infrastructure, and the environment in one plan: The Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal will create 100% employment, with high paying jobs in manufacturing and installation, and throughout the entire economy as the engine of all that employment, and income being expended by those employees, multiplies in all sectors. It will lower commercial input costs by lowering energy bills, which will make American products more competitive and will lower the cost of living as the price of gasoline and heating oil collapse from declining demand, along with lowering the portion of our state and property taxes that go to fossil fuel costs for municipal functions like schools and policing.

It will enhance and sustain two of the largest industries in New York’s 19th District: agriculture and recreation. You don’t have to subscribe to the science of human-caused climate change to see the short and long-term benefits of the Green New Deal. It is an ideal plan for full employment, conservation of nature, and a massive amount of newly generated, and saved, money straight into everyone’s pockets — businesses and employees alike. Even Exxon won’t be hurt — they’re as free to start using the record-high cash reserves they currently hold to start bidding on green energy as anyone else.

Health Care

We need to understand single-payer national health insurance, commonly called Medicare For All, from the known health outcome gains, but from the cost savings and personal and wider economic prosperity perspective, too.

An average of 15-20% of all property taxes go to paying for private health insurance for teachers, cops, firefighters, and all public workers. Those costs go up every year, and with the 2% tax cap, schools and municipalities are forced to cut services along with that — another price local residents pay on top of the insurance costs — that delay in plowing the snow means you didn’t get to work that day, and lost your pay.

For businesses, the cost of employee health care no longer has to be in their product or service cost, and no longer needs to be passed along to the customer. And businesses too small and close to the margin, who can’t afford to offer insurance to their employees, will be healthier and more productive workplaces, as employees who are sick will get treatment, instead of showing up for work while contagious. Not only that, with a single insurance pool, everyone will actually be free, for the first time, to choose any doctor they like for any service, since there will no longer be such a thing as “out of network.” And nobody need ever worry again that a major illness will leave their family bankrupt and homeless. Our commercial and personal lives will finally be stable, and we will all enjoy the consumer confidence and personal security that accompanies that.

National Security and International Relations

Peace: Yes, peace. Anyone remember that? No Democrats speak of it. No Republicans speak of it. But they both just passed, and have promised to continue increasing, an economy-suppressing, and inflation-stimulating, $1.5 trillion military budget during a time in which the United States is not under, nor anticipating, anything resembling an existential threat.

Sure, politicians and the media are reporting this year’s military allocation at $700 billion, boasting it is the “biggest ever,” while, of course, so is the debt being incurred to pay for it. But that’s willfully deceptive, since they all know that our nuclear weapons budget is in the Energy Department’s ledgers, that Veteran’s Affairs are military personnel costs, that the Department of Homeland Security is exclusively a national defense department, and that the weapons we transfer to many nations around the world in exchange for their economic and military alliance is in the State Department budget. Put that together, with a proportional part of our annual interest payments on the debt win incur to finance it relative to total federal expenditures, and you’ve got the real figure: $1.5 trillion.

Reducing that to levels commensurate with the actual degree of threat is both big money back in our pockets, or for other public needs being left unaddressed, like higher education, as well as a more peaceful foreign policy that saves lives, and lowers the international hostilities that raise the price of doing business at home and abroad.

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New York's 19th Congressional District

US House of Representatives, NY District 19 is located in New York's Hudson Valley and Catskills regions. District 19 lies partially in the northernmost region of the New York metropolitan area and mostly south of Albany

After redistricting in 2012, the 19th district comprises all of Columbia, Delaware, Greene, Otsego, Schoharie, Sullivan, and Ulster counties, and parts of Broome, Dutchess, Montgomery, and Rensselaer counties.